


Just So

by thesubparpirate



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Anxiety, HP: EWE, M/M, Obsessive Behavior
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-09
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-07 15:08:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15221852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesubparpirate/pseuds/thesubparpirate
Summary: Draco likes things to be orderly, maybe because so many things in his life aren't. That's hardly a problem. But sometimes, Harry helps him anyway.





	1. Chapter 1

Draco prefers things to be just so.

His flat is spotlessly clean, starting with the bedroom. His clothes are folded neatly in their drawers, side by side. His bed is always made. Every dust bunny that even thought of existing fears for its life in Draco’s domain.

His kitchen is pristine. The metal of the stovetop gleams and his counters look new. Every pot and pan hangs in its place. His china, a family heirloom, stands proudly in a display case, never touched. His silverware lies in neat rows in their dark homes. Sometimes it takes him many tries to stack them up just so.

His living room is lovely. The books on his ever expanding bookshelf are lined up, occasionally by height, occasionally by color, and occasionally by alphabetical order based on author and then genre—it depends on how wild Draco feels that day. He does his organizing by hand. It seems more satisfying when he gets it right, that way. He so rarely gets things right these days.

Draco tried to garden once, he really did: His mother kept telling him how soothing it was. But he found that when he started to pull weeds, he couldn’t stop—everything looked like a weed, or like it could have been one. When he tried to prune away wilted leaves and withered petals, Draco found himself taking one off that looked somewhat shriveled, and why not the one next to it, too? Certainly that was about to go to. And the one next to it, perhaps. And the next one.

And the next one.

And the next.

Draco is not good at gardening. But it matters little to him, because he doesn’t like dirt anyway, and it takes far too much patience to garden. He has settled for the few small cacti which appear throughout his flat, and he likes them—he finds them fitting.

Draco himself is always put together, naturally. His hair is always perfectly combed. His shoes are always shined. His nails are always done. He never bites his nails, but sometimes, when he’s anxious, he picks at his cuticles and the skin around them until he bleeds. The tips of his pointer fingers and thumbs are often pink from new flesh and old scar tissue.

Draco would never say he has a problem, because being conscientious is not a problem, and organization never causes issues. But he can admit—albeit with reluctance—that he periodically gets sidetracked counting the change he keeps in a small jar atop his bookshelf, trying to reach a certain number of Knuts and Sickles. At times he gets distracted with how his quills are arranged in the mug on his desk. Once in a while, the alignment of the floorboards of his flat in relation to the wall and their slightly unmatched angle deeply disturbs him.

Sometimes, there is an unruly hair on one of Draco’s eyebrows that he cannot seem to conquer, so he rips half of them out.  But it’s fine, because he can regrow them. And until then, he can Glamour it perfect. Sometimes, he wonders why he doesn’t simply Glamour himself permanently—but that wouldn’t be realistic, magically speaking. Draco knows this. But it’s difficult.

It’s especially difficult when Draco catches sight of his left forearm. He rarely wears short sleeves anymore.

Sometimes Draco feels breathless, like a malignant entity has just discovered him and has decided his chest would make a wonderful place to throw itself down. During these times, nothing is ever put to right. Everything is too unwieldy, too unruly, too loud and fast and powerful for him to control. It is these times that Draco stacks, or aligns, or folds or shines or counts or counts or picks or picks or picks or picks until his fingers are bleeding and there is a raw, bloody patch running all the way down to his first knuckle that he can’t remember making.

Sometimes he feels totally isolated in this flurry of disaster, and that pushes all the wind out of him even easier than his little demon does.

But sometimes, he has help.

And sometimes, when it does, it comes to him in the form of Harry Potter.


	2. Chapter 2

 

Harry has been coming to help him for a while now.

Draco can’t remember exactly when they met again for the second time, but he was often on the periphery of the circle that Draco moved through. He’d become staunch friends with Luna after the war, in part because her magical mental prowess and his allowed a tentative bond, formed through sheer terror and loneliness, to be solidified while they both lay wretched and defeated in their own prisons. Luna’s was physical: Draco’s was not. For this, she felt herself spared—in being a prisoner, she was free from guilt. But Draco’s decisions kept him locked in a dungeon of his mind’s own making, and Draco did not think his war would ever end as swiftly.

 Through Luna, he made amends to Neville. And through Neville came Potter.

Harry has been surprisingly kind, though Draco does tell himself he shouldn’t be surprised. Boy Wonder’s capacity for forgiveness was so great he tried to disarm the madman who murdered his parents and subsequently ruined his life in a duel to the death, so he figured he was hardly worth the Savior’s animosity after all that. Still, his kindness surprised him. And often, Draco still finds himself wondering what strings could possibly be attached to it.

Harry notices the little things that others do not. For such a remarkably oblivious individual, he is incredibly astute where Draco is concerned.

He is there when Draco has a good day, providing upbeat nonsense and a homemade meal together or a bottle of wine that he remembers Draco selected in an offhand comment or a throw-away decision weeks or months beforehand. They banter and rib each other, passing jibes and riling one another in a teasing manner that feels warm in the same way that Harry’s smile feels when directed at him.  

Every once in a while, Harry pulls him away from the career he doggedly pursues in the Department of Mysteries and manages to get him miraculously out of his flat for a few pints, or a trip to the cinema, or even—on very rare occasions—out dancing. Especially when his flat begins looking too sterile: signs of a lack of life, perhaps, or possibly too much contained energy that had nowhere to go but implosion, spiraling forever tighter, back to one more straightened book on a shelf, or one more stacked spoon, or one more spotless counter top.

When Draco is caught in the whirlwind of his bad days, when his fingers bleed and his hair litters the bathroom rubbish and he can’t seem to catch his breath for the terrible thing that inhabits his chest, Harry is there as well.

“Fuck you, Potter,” Draco says breathlessly, finally able to get air in his lungs. His voice is shaky, and why wouldn’t it be—he had been too busy thinking he was dying to really care about his well-kept facade. The thing in his chest shifts, just slightly, when he feels Harry’s hand on his, and it is enough to stop his head from spinning and his heart from beating so hard it feels about to burst and shrivel within him.

Harry huffs through his nose, a sound that’s fond and just a bit exasperated, and waits with Draco for the terrible thing to retreat to the back of his mind, where it makes itself comfortable most days.

Draco knows he’s an asshole. He’s still snobby and stuck-up, emotionally skittish and has standards that don’t make sense. He has the most convoluted rules about what a partner should and shouldn’t do that clash and conflict constantly, and he doesn't know how to shake them off. 

He’s trying, but he doesn’t know if he’s trying _enough_. He doesn’t think, if he’s not already there, that he wants to push himself that much farther to be there. Just being where he is exhausts him. 

And yet, Harry doesn’t berate him for it.

Harry deserves much more than Draco can offer. Draco, who has panic attacks regularly enough that he panics about panicking whenever he has to attend a new event or speak to a new representative, feeling like every side-eye is a baleful glare, every unthinking gesture is a raised wand against him. He enjoys his job in the Department of Mysteries, shunted away in his office in the basement of the Ministry, where few people have reason to come and even fewer have the clearance to do so. But he worries that he enjoys it because it enables him to indulge his anxiety, too. He spins and twists, caught in an endless spiral. 

He worries about Harry, as well, though he doesn’t know how to articulate it. Harry hasn’t done much in public after quitting the Aurors a few years ago. Scandalous articles were written about him when the news first came out—that he’d quit because he was heartbroken over Ginny, or he’d quit because he was pursuing a career as a Quidditch player, or a model, or renouncing magic entirely and was planning to live as a muggle. None were true, though Harry did have a startling amount of non-magic appliances for a very wealthy wizard. 

It is pointless for people to try to figure out why Harry quit the Aurors, because, as he once explained to Draco, he can’t really explain it himself. Listening to his intuition has kept him alive and mostly well thus far—he wasn’t about to stop simply because Voldemort had ceased to exist.

So now Harry’s attention is split between caring for Teddy and helping George invent his latest catastrophe (and, on far too many occasions for Draco’s liking, volunteering as a test subject). Andromeda still takes the little boy when she can, but it’s clear that Harry and Teddy adore one another. 

Draco sees his cousin often and always with Harry in tow, but never for too long. Despite Harry’s best efforts Draco does not think it would be in the boy’s best interest to pursue a close relationship with him. Draco is not, nor has he ever been, regarded in the public eye as a paragon of righteousness the way Teddy’s godfather is. And, if he is brutally honest with himself, he doesn’t trust himself to be a worthy role model.

Draco loves his parents dearly, but he knows they’ve made a monster. He knows that they, too, are monstrous themselves. He knows that all of them still have prejudices that they don’t know how to handle, and he knows that none of them can bear to blame themselves for this. Everything is his parents’ fault, and even though he knows this isn’t true, there is a vast canyon between knowing and feeling that he does not know how to cross. 

They are three people reaching out to one another with one hand and pushing each other away with the other, and they do not know how to fix it. So they remain suspended in a strange, stilted sort of limbo, where he can make pleasantries with his parents and talk about nothing and laugh politely—sometimes even genuinely—but the moment they attempt to uncover anything real, all they ever discover is a tangle of rage and resentment and a deep, aching bitterness that none of them know how to manage.

Draco doesn’t want to burden his poor cousin with this type of complicated relationship. He does not believe that he was ever cursed, because he knows that he isn’t blameless. But he knows himself, and he knows his family, and he knows that Andromeda’s exile freed her from something quite like darkness. He does not want to drag such a bright, kind child back into those shadows.

Harry understands, at least a little. But his protests of “You aren’t them, Draco” seem to run weak against the overwhelming evidence in Draco’s head. And though he protests, he never pushes. Somehow, he knows what it’s like to be afraid of oneself. He knows what it’s like, to fear one's upbringing. He knows the cold terror that runs down Draco’s spine when he imagines hurting someone the way that his parents accidentally hurt him: even when all their intentions for him were the best, they somehow hurt him the most.

Harry doesn’t know how deeply painful it is to be loved and unloved by the same people. He only experienced the pure, unfettered love that parents have for the person they created, the infant who is without a personality yet, and then he experienced the distilled resentment and aggression for not being the sort of person his replacement caretakers wanted. He has never experienced both from the same person - that difficult conflict between being told he is loved and shown he is loved one moment and then berated and betrayed the next - not the way Draco has. And it is this which tells him that Harry is much better suited to caretaking for Teddy than Draco will ever be: he can feel it in the sure way that Harry holds his hand, the gentleness of his touch on his neck. Harry has only ever loved unconditionally, and Draco has never learned how to do it at all.

But every day, he drags himself out of bed. He takes a shower and puts on the clothes that feel right for that day. He’s stopped using gel, because he knows Harry prefers his hair soft, and he’s begun using a muggle razor, because he’s conceded that sometimes magic is not always as relaxing as doing things for oneself, alone.

He does this not only for himself, but with thoughts of others in the back of his mind, and these thoughts battle the ones the reptilian creature that lives there likes to whisper to him. He wants to make his loved ones proud more than he wants to appease the bloodless, fearful thing he carries within him. He wants to make Harry proud.

Not all the time, but sometimes, Draco fixes a second plate for breakfast. Sometimes he makes a third as well.

He does not know how to love unconditionally, not yet. He fears he may never truly learn. But he is trying. Even if, some days, this is not enough.

Harry knows this. And even if he doesn’t say it often, he is proud.

And sometimes, that is enough.


End file.
